Living in urban areas can offer convenient access to work, commerce, and culture, and perhaps that’s why more than half of the people on Earth call those places home now, with the number expected to rise to two-thirds by 2050, according to a report from the United Nations. Read about how urban microclimate impacts water use, energy use, and pollutant transport, as well as the overall comfort and well being of the inhabitants of urban areas.

Historically, the influenza A virus has been responsible for millions of deaths worldwide each year. The persistence of seasonal H1N1 and H3N2 strains costs between 3,000 and 49,000 lives annually in the United States alone. Influenza pandemics, or global circulations of highly transmissible and pathogenic viral strains, have occurred four times in the past century.

Eric Dawson is a senior biology student at UT Austin and a three-year TACC intern. He was also the team leader of UT's Student Cluster competition team. Here, he discusses how working on projects for The iPlant Collaborative through TACC has impacted his college experience and future career plans.

Last month, a group of 20 plant scientists from the U.S. and Europe convened at the Texas Advanced Computing Center in Austin to participate in the Arabidopsis Information Portal (AIP) Developer’s Workshop.

Researchers in the Parallel Algorithms for Data Analysis and Simulation (PADAS) group at UT Austin are integrating mathematics, computer science and applications, and then scaling them to supercomputing platforms to develop scientific software. Using resources at TACC including Stampede and its Xeon Phi coprocessors, Lonestar and Maverick, the team is working to impact many areas in health and science.